I've seen that there's been a lot of confusion on whether or not the new LFR loot rules will be helpful, and I wanted to offer an intelligent discussion on it. Many folks agree that current loot rules in LFR are less than ideal. Myself, I need on everything and then wheel and deal to get the stuff I really want (90% of people just stopped reading). It's not a polite move, but if other people are doing it, I'm disdvantaging myself by not following suit.

The new LFR system doesn't roll in the traditional sense. All the rolls happen behind the scenes. This isn't exactly new - if you've run enough dungeons, you've undoubtedly tied a roll with someone at some point. When that happens, the game re-rolls a tie-breaker behind-the-scenes. The new system will roll for everyone. At this point, nobody can accuse anyone else of being a jerk - everybody rolls all the time by default.

Roll bonuses, and re-rolls from daily tokens aside - the folks with the highest behind-the-scenes roll (btsroll) will "win" loot. The game checks out the boss's loot table, filters out all the stuff that's not useful for your toon, and randomly picks something from the stuff that is useful.

From the sounds of it, I'm not sure that folks will be able to win more than one peice of loot, but that could be my mistake. What I really want to talk about is why this is better than the current system. How many folks have run a LFR where you're rolling against a dozen people on a token? It sucks, right? Especially when there's 1 shaman, no warriors and 2 hunters... It's almost like running a really lopsided Baradin Hold - you get one chance to get loot from a boss, and if you have to roll against a whole bunch of other guys, it kinda defeats the point.

Right now, a boss dies and he drops random crap. He doesn't care what you raid comp is. It's totally random - you may have a thrown drop from Morchok when there are no rogues in the raid. In the above example, your token has a 1 in 3 chance of dropping from a boss, then you have a 1 in 12 chance of winning it. Alternatively, the hunter has a 1 in 3 chance of his token dropping, and a 1 in 3 chance of winning it. Your odds are 1 in 36. The hunter has 1 in 9. His odds are 4x better than yours.

All because of the comp. As if finding a non-fail LFR wasn't a long enough wait... you currently get shafted in unbalanced groups (unless you're a shaman, hunter, or warrior - but let's be real Murphy Law's is right more than it's wrong). In the new system, everyone would have an even chance of getting a token - regardless of the comp class balance. You roll to see who gets to win loot - everyone rolls. Then the game picks something 'useful' (though if you already have it, you just get to vendor / DE it - and if the boss loot table has nothing for you, you get gold).

tl;dr - It's a bit more fair, and allows the LFR a wider berth to put together groups that are role balanced but maybe not class-balanced (ie-faster queuing than waiting for a class-balanced group). Further, the removal of loot-trading means you can't bring your buds and try to game the system. Everyone now has the same chance at loot, regardless of their class and how many buddies they bring with them. Sure you'll still get stuff that maybe you can't use, but you put in the time and work on the run, so you earned the gold - and that same problem occurs in normal raids and dungeons still. It's not perfect, but it's a definite improvement over what we have now.